I truly don't mean this as Sasha-bashing, but I must say I was struck by this comment:

"It's been tough," Cohen said of her competitive season so far. "I haven't really had a chance to train since before my Grand Prix series began. It starts to show when you are traveling and competing and don't have time to stay at home and train."

Well…..nobody's forcing her to compete in pro-am cheesefests. The Grand Prix alone wouldn't account for no training time. Discuss?

At 16, she began working on the quadruple salchow, landing her first one in competition at Skate America in 2001.

I attended Skate America that year, and as I recall, she TRIED to land the quadruple salchow in competition, but did not.

As far as "not having time to train", I find that hard to swallow. Competitive skaters train hour after hour nearly every day of the week. When you travel to your competition site, there is always an opportunity to practice, especially when you are at the elite level. When Sasha was here in 2001 for Skate America, she was featured in our local newspaper practicing at several ice rinks in town.

I'd cut her some slack. We all know how those interviews go - how easily what we actually say gets twisted and turns out to be something entirely different in print. It's become something of a joke in my family whenever one of us is interviewed for the Irish dance business: we consider it a successful interview if there's 50% accuracy in the final print product. :yes:

Well, I'm a former skater, so I think I can speak about the lack of training time :
she's right, when you're in the Grand Prix circuit, you can't really say you train during the grand prix season. Why ? in her case, it means three weeks away from home, and when you finally get home, you have recover from the competition during at least two days ! During the GP season, you don't train as much as usual, I would say you just try to keep up what you did during summer. And training on the competition site has nothing do do with practising at your homerink: in most of the cases, you only have two 45 mns practise sessions, and that's all. At home, you generally skate four to five of sessions per day. And when you train at a competition site, the judges are watching, so you're very careful and just try to impress them : that mean you don't jump as much as home, because the main goal is to avoid falling !